mobeus's posterous

Copying is the highest form of flattery

Sat, 19 May 2012 09:59:55 -0700

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For Mom

Thu, 17 May 2012 06:52:46 -0700

Flowers left in memorial of my mom

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Another shot of the Shuttle

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 23:24:16 -0700

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Enterprise Flyby

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 21:38:06 -0700

Here's the best shot I got of the flyby by the Enterprise on it's carrier aircraft as it passed over Liberty State Park.

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Shuttle flyby

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 07:50:41 -0700

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Misty day in New York

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:02:19 -0700

I love Misty days in New York. It will make me think of my childhood.

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Maplewood swings

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:37:28 -0700

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Spring in Central Park

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:38:59 -0700

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Find the hidden iPad

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:07:04 -0700

I got home from NYC tonight to find my FedEx guy had put on his thinking cap and hidden my expensive iPad where no one would find it.

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Shysters R Us

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:08:58 -0800

This ad was on a bouncy castle at the Purim festival of a young cousins school. I just thought that the ad for personal injury lawyers ON the bouncy castle was a tad bit much. Call confused.

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Spot the Error!!!

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 22:04:00 -0800

This is a vendor cart outside Grand Central Terminal on Christmas Eve.

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Bad omen

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:54:19 -0800

You know it's going to be a harsh winter when squirrels tails are very bushy. What does it mean when they commit suicide in your toilet?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sent from MobeusPhone
Michael Kivetz. Mobeus@mobeus.net
862-812-5887

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Thoughts

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:37:31 -0700

I'm at Liberty State Park before a client and I'm looking around at all the scenery. Last night I attended the viewing of a colleague who died suddenly. Jim was probably the nicest, kindest men you're ever likely to have met. I knew him through working at Apple for over 4 years. And today, here in this park, the world seems a bit small for his passing. No one will ever get to know how he could make you feel good even if it was a bad day. He was the last person I talked to before I walked out of Apple as an employee for the last time and even then he tried to make me feel better. I'm glad to see all the work that's gone on here. And the tower is really starting to take shape. I can't wait to see it finished.

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sent from MobeusPhone
Michael Kivetz. Mobeus@mobeus.net
862-812-5887

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Ode to an Electronic Urn

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:32:00 -0700

I had wanted to write something about Apple and it's design and innovation a few weeks ago. I had thought it was time that Apple looked at what it had done and reevaluated how it supported an industry that showed it no real respect and continually used them to break new ground before they would redesign anything.

And then Steve died.

That sad thing, as if that weren't sad enough, is having lived through my father's fight with pancreatic cancer I knew that Steve Jobs was living on borrowed time. Even if he survived the original cancer and was cancer free for 5 years, the chance that he would get cancer again was, unfortunately, very good. I know that sounds kind of counterintuitive, but just by surviving cancer once, doesn't mean your immune. And most of the treatments leave your system open to other infections.

While I was working for Apple, I had composed, but never sent, a letter to Steve saying he should treat each day as if it were his last and, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, suck the marrow out of life. I sent a shortened version of that to him soon after he announced his retirement from Apple.

To many, Apple products have an aura of being cool or hip or just plain great. For me, they have always been classic designs of what worked best. 50 years from now, people are going to look at the iMac or the iPhone and say 'that's a classic design'. And like a Marcel Brauer chair or the Helvetica type face, these things stand up to the test of time.

Now that Steve has gone, you can't look anywhere without someone calling Steve a Genius or an Innovator, or even a greater mind than Einstein. While I am a fanboy, I can distance myself to say that he was definitely a great businessman, I can't say his was a greater thinking than Einstein. I would place him in the ranks of Ford, Libby, or even Thomas Jefferson for innovation and entrepreneurism. Steve was a genius because he surrounded himself with geniuses in their fields. His key was that he saw something that every entrepeneur sees but no one else does, an opportunity.

Let's face it. Apple NEVER invented the personal computer. They never invented the MP3 Player. They weren't the first to make an ALL-In One computer. What they did do, though, was to make them better and easier to use than anyone else ever thought possible. The first home computers were massive, expensive monsters that used audio tape for memory and a text-based display that only an engineer could love. The Apple I changed that by making them cheap and graphic. The first MP3 players didn't even have a display and held less than 100 songs. The iPod changed that by making them small in size, huge in capacity, and put a display on them that had a menu that made sense to use. And the first All-In-One computers were as big as a table, had flaky memory media and were STILL text-based. The Lisa, than then the much more sucessful Mac Plus were small, light, portable, used a sturdy floppy disk and were GRAPHIC. But they also used a mouse. The mouse was the key to giving the user a real link to the computer experiance. And that's what made the difference.

Apple's designs make a link with the user that 99% of the designers of electronics couldn't even approach. Why is that? Because like a lot of designers, they think in terms of form follows function. Apple believes that function not only follows form, but that form can be capable of dictating a new function. The first iPod worked better than anything out there because it used a huge circular dial with 4 buttons around the edge and one in the center. Even for someone who spoke no english or didn't read the manual, virtually anyone could use it within seconds.

Will all this innovation and entrepenurism fade? Will Apple succumb to the inertia that most companies face? Only time will tell, but the people who Steve put in charge of Apple are some of the best at what they do. Jon Ives is one of the greatest industrial designers since Lowe. Ron Johnson, President of Apple Retail, has created a retail space that generates so much money per square foot that major retailers like Macy's, Nordstrom's and Sak's are reevaluating their sales strategies. And Tim Cook, President and CEO of Apple Inc, has worked his way through the company and knows just how to get the most out of his staff in Cupertino. The game is theirs to lose.

Steve P. Jobs
RIP 1955-2011

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New Space

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:28:00 -0700

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Well I finally got into my new space @ Neumanns. Had a chat with Nick about getting more of my stuff up here. Should be good.

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Thoughts about 9/11

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:10:00 -0700

I was looking at a new studio space in the same place I already have a studio in Hoboken, when I looked out one of the window and saw the lights beaming up from the WTC site. It caused me to think about things again.

It's that time of year where we're (me, really) forced to face, not just the deaths that occurred that day, but what brought us to that point. Now that Bin Laden is dead, we can even relax a bit about it. The mad man who's anger drove him to warp his beliefs, and those of others, is gone, but now we can look at what truly made him sacrifice thousands at his alter of ego. If his goal was so noble, so divine, why did we find him 10 years later, living in a nice compound with his wives and aides, watching TV and eating good food, and not sacrificing himself in some act of terror? Why did he have to conscript disaffected, easily lead people to do his evil bidding?

One thing that has always struck me was why go after the WTC buildings? Sure, they're tall, but you couldn't believe you could push them over, any engineer would have said as much. And the way the buildings did implode was almost exaclty how it would have fallen if you melted the internal structure. Was there another reason they would choose it? I keep thinking about the Robert Redford film 'Three Days Of The Condor' where the CIA was based in NYC there. Could these men have seen this movie and thought it was real? Or even possible?

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After the storm

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 13:53:38 -0700

I'm in morristown to see some clients who live in the outer areas that have power. The city itself is without power and the street intersections are being manned by police who are guiding traffic because the traffic lights are out. People are walking through the city center but all they can do is window shop since none of the stores could open without power. So people peer into shop windows, read menus and just watch the traffic go by. Throughout the city is evidence of the awesome force that blew through here over the weekend. Trees, some dating to the American Revolution were toppled or ripped like so much celery or twigs. It's amazing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sent from MobeusPhone
Michael Kivetz. Mobeus@mobeus.net
862-812-5887

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Happy 4th!

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 21:08:00 -0700

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Simple Art

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 21:07:00 -0700

I was driving through the west village near Spring St. last week and I caught this impromptu sculpture. Someone had taken a bunch of loose boxes that were on the sidewalk and cut them up a bit. And then glued (I think?) to the plywood wall (over the "Please Post no Bills" sign). I don't know how long it must have taken, 10 minutes to an hour, but it's such a simple concept, it's wonderful.

Here, someone had taken a blank wall and embedded art into it. I don't know if it was intended or just something someone did because they were bored. It doesn't really matter. What resulted was a simple, elegant piece of urban art.

To the unknown artist...

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Space station pics

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:42:00 -0700

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I don't know how the image failed to attach last time. So here are three! And they were shot with my iPhone. If you blowup the pictures a bit you can see the cross-form of the space station.

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